She’s a Mil

I attended another protest on Tueday. Well, the organisers weren’t calling it a protest they were calling it a welcome. You see the NT state government has come to Alice for parliament this week and we were asked to come down to the convention centre to welcome them and remind them that there are many people in Alice Springs who do not want a Uranium mine in our town. Not sure how many of us there were, it wasn’t huge but it wasn’t small either but we seemed to get a fair bit of media time. Local media of course but that’s okay.

In regards to the other protest about the Alice Springs by laws that we were sleeping out against we had a bit of success really. I mean not just us of course lots of people wrote letters and attended meetings as well as our sleep out but the council obviously heard and seriously watered down their by laws. Still not perfect as far as I’m concerned and a lot more needs to be done in this place to improve but they were watered down enough to be fairly insignificant. So that is a bit of boost really and hopefully a nice little reminder to all of you who read this and are involved in many areas of social action that it can make small differences I suppose.

Yesterday I helped one of my students write a resume. He is going for a job as a cleaner at the hospital but they wanted a resume. Having no one else here to ask he asked me if I would help him and I agreed. In the process of creating his resume we had the most profound conversation.

He is an Afghani man who arrived in Australia 3 months ago. He fled the Taliban in 2000 and then spent 9 years getting here (illegally) through Pakistan and Indonesia. I couldn’t understand everything but he kept saying “guns” and “dogs” and “Taliban very bad” I think he was trying to tell me that the Taliban treat people like dogs and that they held him at gunpoint and took his business from him. He told me all this as I tried to piece together his work and education history which as you can imagine having spent the last 9 years as an illegal refugee is fairly sparse. His education history isn’t great either, 8 years at primary school then military training for 10 years where he mostly learned to read and write. I ended up deciding it was probably better to not put in anything. I think most employers would be fairly put off by someone who had primary school education and 10 years in the Afghani military. The saddest thing though is that there is nothing at all to put someone off this man. He is the simply the most gentle, polite, respectful and kind man with me and with all the students in the class. He has so much challenged any stereotyped ideas about Muslim men that I had (and I had them I have to confess but all my Afghani students especially him have made me realise that they may be the most misunderstood people in the world). He actually stands up when I come into the classroom. A habit I am trying to stop as quickly as I can I must say. Especially, as I feel that it is I who should be standing up when he comes in. A man who has been through all that he has but has maintained such a gentle spirit and no bitterness is truly extraordinary I reckon. I don’t think he feels like that though, having been treated in the ways that he has been treated he has lost most of his pride in himself.

As he left he said to me “You are very nice. What can I do for you?” I actually teared up. How could I tell him that I am actually not that nice. That I benefit on a daily basis from the exploitation of people like him, helping him write a resume is the least I can do. But more than that I wanted to somehow explain to him that in the sharing of his story with me he had given me something worth so much more than the resume I had written for him but I couldn’t quite find the words.

Then I came home and watched Q and A and Lateline. As the politicians and the people battled it out about what we are going to do about “boat people” and how we are going to get “the balance right of being compassionate and protecting our borders” I just wanted to scream.

I was in the paper yesterday. Well sort of. A group of us are sleeping out on the Todd Mall (the main drag of Alice) every three weeks in protest of some proposed council by-laws that would no longer allow people to beg or protest and would allow the police the right to move people on (for no particular reason) and take people’s blankets and dispose of them. Nice isn’t taking blankets from the homeless and fining people who are begging now that’s a smart way to solve the problem.

Anyway yesterday I did an interview with a guy from our local paper. We chatted for awhile about how we as a group believe that these laws are unjust and unfairly target the indigenous population. We also talked about the fact that we as a group are having a really profound time sleeping out as the local homeless community (all indiegnous) have been so welcoming of us into their space and many have joined us to sleep. We are all learning more about each other and building some relationships across cultures. In a town where in the last month or so we have had a young indigenous man murdered by a group of white men; someone giving away white pride shirts on the mall and a massive increase of break and enters into people’s homes and businesses this is much needed. Not much of this was mentioned in the article though. In fact the article was only about 10 lines long and I was quoted out of context a few time. The guy talked mostly about how the police and rangers have not done anything about us. If this was made in comparison to what they do to the indigenous people sleeping out this may have been okay but it seemed more an encouragement to get the police to arrest us than anything else.

There is another protest going on in town though about the changerooms at the local football oval not been up to scratch. A couple of citizens have got together and are encouraging the council to build better ones. This protest got over half a page dedicated to it and the second page (we were on at least the fifth)!!! There was a big emotive headline and big picture of some white men looking very cross and ready for a fight.

Is it only me or is there something seriously wrong when people fighting for a better changerooms for footballers get more attention than people fighting for just treatment of the marginalised in our community.

On Tuesday I went and saw Slumdog Millionaire with John. David, Tom, Martin, John and I had dinner at our place and then we were all going to see a film together. Martin piked and as usual we wanted to see different things. Two fillms “The Wrestler” and “Slumdog Millionaire” were on at the same time so Tom and David went to the Wrestler and we went to Slumdog. I think I might try and do that more often. Too often I see films I don’t want to for the sake of togetherness and you hardly talk anyway.

I loved Slumdog Millionaire. They managed to show much of the tragedy of living in a slum in India without totally destroying me. I was able to cry and laugh and I loved the characters, the story and the shots of India.

However my experience of it was slightly tarnished yeasterday when I read in the SMH that the children in the film, who come from the slums themselves were not paid a sufficient salary. Rubina Ali the little girl was paid $1060 and Azharuddin Ismail, the boy was paid $3600. The director claims there is also a trust fund but the parents don’t know anything about and they are still living in the slums. I am conscious that these things are complicated and that there are consequences of young children going from extreme poverty to wealth in a day however, depite that I think it is wrong to take advantage of them and patronising to not pay what one would pay someone who had not come from the slums. It is wrong that while the film and thus its British director and his team make millions while these children live in the tragic conditions that film was exposing. They were particuarly exposing people who find children on the streets and teach them to be beggars and then make themselves rich on the money the children earn. As far as I am concerned what the directors of this film are doing is nearly as bad.

Yesterday I attended Yabun 2009. Yabun is held on Australia Day, or what most people there were calling Survival Day, to celebrate Indigenous cultures. I think the name Survival Day is a great name and it was a wonderful, wonderful day. After spending the previous evening reading some disgustingly racist comments by people on Facebook it was probably the only way I would have been able to get into Australia Day at all. And it all came as a complete suprise to me. I love days that you are not expecting much of but turn out to be great. Only problem is that you don’t think to tell anyone else about it.

Back to Yabun, it was held at Victoria Park, just down the road from us. It opened up with some traditional dancing and smoking and of course a recognition of the Gadigal people on whose land we were gathered. Then Martin and I went off to hear a panel discuss indigenous singing/songwriting. This panel included none other than Kev Carmody. It was very interesting and there were only about 30 people there so intimate too. What I mainly got out of it was how most of them just wanted to be recognised as artists in their genre ie conutry or acoustic or rap rather than as indigenous. Many of them wanted to write about political issues and thought that important but they also wanted to be able to write about love or nature without feeling like it was unnecessary.

After that we sat on the grass and listened to some different artists play and had some lunch. I ate Turkish food to celebrate Australia’s multiculturalism (and because I really like it). We listened to some people reflect on the apology and where to from here and then more music, Kev included.

After the festival we went to the Frenchs to celebrate Jo’s birthday and farewell her. That was a bit sad for me, very sad actually but it was a great to spend the night with her and some other lovelies. We had a BBQ which I suppose was fitting.

So yay for Survival Day.

“When I heard the news my heart fell on the floor
I was on plane on my way to Baltimore
In these troubled times it’s hard enough as it is
My soul’s known a better life than this.
I wondered how so many could be in so much pain
While others don’t seem to feel a thing
Then I cursed my whiteness and I get so damned depressed
In a world of suffering why should I be so blessed.”
Brett Dennen from so much more

A few weeks ago our dear friend’s Kat and Tom gave us a CD by Brett Dennen. For no particular reason, just that they thought we’d like him (don’t you love presents like that?) and we do like him, I especially love him. And he has been particularly helpful to be in the last week (Jo I hope that answers your question).

After a few years ban on intense, real life movies I decided that I should crawl out of my hole and go and watch one. I think I ended my drought more intensely than I should. Tuesday night I saw “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo”. I was invited by the one of the girls from the migrant and refugee department at work who had a free ticket and convinced me using the tag line “their stories need to be heard”. As you can imagine it was simply horrendous. It was a documentary and the woman who made it was there on the night. She had been gang raped herself and said, as the tag line did that she and these women want their stories to be told because until they are nothing will be done. So I sat through an hour and half listening to women tell stories of been raped by up to 7 men at a time, with guns and pieces of wood and anything else they could get their hands on. Stories of rejection after been raped as their husbands and families will no longer have them as well as the fact that many can no longer control their bladders and bowels. This has happened to literally hundreds of thousands of women. Such large scale rape is a strategy of war, a war that she believes is been fought on a large part due to the fact that the Congo has 80% of the world’s coaltan, a metal used in mobile phones and laptops. There were some Congolese women in the audience. One, perhaps two, who were sitting behind began to weep and wail half way through. It was a sound I won’t forget for awhile.

Then on Wednesday as I was still recovering Ryan somehow convinced me to go and see a film as part of the Mexican film festival titled “La Zona” or “The Zone. That was a bad decision. I can not say it was equally as horrendous as the greatest silence” but it wasn’t good. All about inequality and corruption in Mexico. How the lives of the poor are just traded for money and power and everyone assumes their lives and deaths will just go un-noticed. And for the most part they do I suppose except by their mothers and one of the last scenes of this film was that of a mother searching for her missing son.

I came home and listened to Brett Dennen:

“I don’t feel comfortable with the way my clothes fit
I can’t get used to my bodies limit
I got some fancy shoes to chase away these blues
They cost a lot money but they aren’t worth a thing
I want to free my feet from the broken glass and concrete
I want to get away from this city
And lay upon the ground staring a hole in the sky
Wondering where we go when we die”

I was reading the newspaper this morning. Maybe I am not taking things seriously enough but I am bit over stories about the global economy. Not to mention in an already overly worried and anxious society I find the reporting irresponsible and overly fear provoking than necessary (especially the day after stress less day). I mean you have to love some of these fear and anxiety raising phrases from the smh, “growing international crisis”, “rapidly slowing global economy now a reality”, “in the midst of a financial meltdown consumer confidence plunged”, “financial market turmoil stirred worries about the economy”, “sending a chilling message to retailers as we approach the Christmas season”.

And in the midst of all this I did find a story that did concern me even though it was told as some kind of feel good story. The story was about a group of school children from a remote indigenous commuinty called Wadeye (about 450 kilometres south-west of Darwin) who have just won a trip to Rome via Singapore and London for a dance turned into a film about the Rainbow Serpent.

At this point no worries really. I mean I did think about the effect of culture shock on these kids who according to the school’s co-principal, “have never had to cross a busy street” but in the end not my call and could be a really great experience.

However, in the second last paragraph where most people would have given up reading (including myself if I was not particualrly interested in these issues) it is revealed that “the $120,000 award was sponsored by the multinational mining company Eni”.

However not to worry the school’s co-principal assures us that “it was only a coincidence that Eni is developing the Blacktip Gas pipeline from a gas field in the sea off Wadeye to Darwin”.

Only a coincidence??? While I am not that in to conspiracy theories I am not convinced despite the assurances.

You keep us waiting.
You, the God of time,
want us to wait
for the right time in which to discover
who we are, where we must go,
who will be with us, and what we must do
So thank you… for the waiting time.

You keep us looking.
You the God of all space,
want us to look in the right and wrong places
for signs of hope
for people who are without hope
for visions of a better world which will appear
among the disappointments of the world we know.
So thank you… for the looking time.

You keep us loving.
You the God whose name is love,
want us to be like you -
to love the loveless, the unlovely and the unlovable;
and most difficult of all
to love ourselves
So thank you… for the loving time.

And in all this, you keep us.
Through the hard questions with no easy anwers;
through failing where we hoped to succeed
and making an impact when we felt useless;
through the patience and the dreams and the love of other;
and through Jesus Christ and his Spirit,
you keep us.
So thank you… for the keeping time,
and for now
and for ever
Amen

Iona Community Worship book (1998)